in Internet sense, c.2000, short for robot. Its modern use has curious affinities with earlier uses, e.g. "parasitical worm or maggot" (1520s), of unknown origin; and Australian-New Zealand slang "worthless, troublesome person" (World War I-era). The method of minting new slang by clipping the heads off words does not seem to be old or widespread in English. Examples (za from pizza, zels from pretzels, rents from parents) are American English student or teen slang and seem to date back no further than late 1960s.
2010 SIRI: Though Siri is considered colloquially to be a virtual assistant rather than a conversational bot, it was built off the same technologies and paved the way for all later AI bots and PAs. Siri is an intelligent personal assistant with a natural language UI to respond to questions and perform web-based service requests. Siri was part of apples IOS.

What began as a televised ad campaign eventually became a fully interactive chatbot developed for PG Tips’ parent company, Unilever (which also happens to own an alarming number of the most commonly known household brands) by London-based agency Ubisend, which specializes in developing bespoke chatbot applications for brands. The aim of the bot was to not only raise brand awareness for PG Tips tea, but also to raise funds for Red Nose Day through the 1 Million Laughs campaign.

Most chatbots try to mimic human interactions, which can frustrate users when a misunderstanding arises. Watson Assistant is more. It knows when to search for an answer from a knowledge base, when to ask for clarity, and when to direct you to a human. Watson Assistant can run on any cloud – allowing businesses to bring AI to their data and apps wherever they are.
Do the nature of our services and size of our customer base warrant an investment in a more efficient and automated customer service response? How can we offer a more streamlined experience without (necessarily) increasing costly human resources? Amtrak’s website receives over 375,000 daily visitors, and they wanted a solution that provided users with instant access to online self-service.

At a high level, a conversational bot can be divided into the bot functionality (the "brain") and a set of surrounding requirements (the "body"). The brain includes the domain-aware components, including the bot logic and ML capabilities. Other components are domain agnostic and address non-functional requirements such as CI/CD, quality assurance, and security.

Telegram launched its bot API in 2015, and launched version 2.0 of its platform in April 2016, adding support for bots to send rich media and access geolocation services. As with Kik, Telegram’s bots feel spartan and lack compelling features at this point, but that could change over time. Telegram has also yet to add payment features, so there are not yet any shopping-related bots on the platform.
Like apps and websites, bots have a UI, but it is made up of dialogs, rather than screens. Dialogs help preserve your place within a conversation, prompt users when needed, and execute input validation. They are useful for managing multi-turn conversations and simple "forms-based" collections of information to accomplish activities such as booking a flight.
This was a strategy eBay deployed for holiday gift-giving in 2018. The company recognized that purchasing gifts for friends and family isn’t necessarily a simple task. For many of their customers, selecting gifts had become a stressful and arduous process, especially when they didn’t have a particular item in mind. In response to this feeling, eBay partnered with Facebook Messenger to introduce ShopBot.
However, chatbots are not just limited to answering queries and providing basic knowledge. They can work as an aid to the teacher/instructor by identifying spelling and grammatical mistakes with precision, checking homework, assigning projects, and, more importantly, keeping track of students' progress and achievements. A human can only do so much, whereas a bot has virtually an infinite capacity to store and analyse all data.
If it happens to be an API call / data retrieval, then the control flow handle will remain within the ‘dialogue management’ component that will further use/persist this information to predict the next_action, once again. The dialogue manager will update its current state based on this action and the retrieved results to make the next prediction. Once the next_action corresponds to responding to the user, then the ‘message generator’ component takes over.
This is the big one. We worked with one particular large publisher (can’t name names unfortunately, but hundreds of thousands of users) in two phases. We initially released a test phase that was sort of a “catch all”. Anyone could message a broad keyword to their bot and start a campaign. Although we had a huge number of users come in, engagement was relatively average (87% open rate and 27.05% click-through rate average over the course of the test). Drop off here was fairly high, about 3.14% of users had unsubscribed by the end of the test.
One pertinent field of AI research is natural language processing. Usually, weak AI fields employ specialized software or programming languages created specifically for the narrow function required. For example, A.L.I.C.E. uses a markup language called AIML, which is specific to its function as a conversational agent, and has since been adopted by various other developers of, so called, Alicebots. Nevertheless, A.L.I.C.E. is still purely based on pattern matching techniques without any reasoning capabilities, the same technique ELIZA was using back in 1966. This is not strong AI, which would require sapience and logical reasoning abilities.